It's pretty easy to change your settings so you can receive only one weekly (or no) emails from different LinkedIn groups. I've done it several times and the change seems to go through immediately, which is great.

I'm not sure that's the case. I have a Premium account, and was still bombarded with emails (typically 3/day, every day, which is just far too many). I changed my email settings, though, which has made them much more managable.

I think many of the people getting a lot of junk mail from LinkedIn haven't changed their deafult settings. When you upgrade from free to at least one of the paid options you only get the weekly updates, connection requests, and email from my saved searches AKA sales leads. More activity = more emails.

Some really interesting and insightful tips here. IT can be quite difficult when you first approach LinkedIn without a clue on what works and what doesn't - or you might not even realise how quite so competitive it is.

The company I work is actually running a webinar on this on Friday should people be looking to gain even more insight on how to build your LinkedIn profile: http://www.kelsopr.com/linkedin-webinar

You hit the nail on the head. Endorsements are purposely easy, but that actually degrades the feature. They're too easy. Thankfully, I've heard from a number of hiring managers who say that LinkedIn Recommendations are much more valuable than endorsements. You also make a good point about who you accept into your network. It's easy and tempting to just click "Accept" for everyone who sends an invitation, but just like Endorsements -- it degrades the value of your network.

I think they made endorsing people too easy. Its just one click and you have endorsed a contact. I don't typically do that if I do not know the person. Linkedin has so much potential because I find, everyone in business is on this site! What I am doing is going through my contacts, reexamining why I added them and possibly reconnecting with them. I think its important not to have too many contacts that you do not know, having lots of contacts without knowing who they are, defeats the purpose of being on Linkedin. IMO.

Its so crucial to take these steps and make your profile have personal executive branding. You can find additional resources and articles here as well as a free eBook. http://premiumlinked.wordpress.com/

You have some great tips in here and there is a lot of synergy in our series on "Why you're getting LinkedIn completely wrong", although we are focusing on lead generation through LinkedIn specifically, a lot of the same issues arise when you are Job Hunting on LinkedIn too.

That's a good question, I find that I get a lot of requests from sales people and have "endorsements" from other sales people who really don't know much about me. I do see the usefulness when people inside the industry I work in sends a connection request. Maybe one day I'll figure out what it's really good for and start leveraging that.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.